


We All Need to Be Protected

by Pic_Akai



Series: Skye 'verse [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, bereavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 05:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pic_Akai/pseuds/Pic_Akai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock does a fine job of protecting John and Mary's child. Mycroft Holmes is protecting himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We All Need to Be Protected

The Watsons - minus their offpsring - have gone out, leaving a mountainous pile of baby-related paraphenalia in Sherlock's living room. He rarely watches Skye at his flat, usually finding it easier to go to John and Mary's, so on the odd occasion that it does happen he always seems to have forgotten how much _stuff_ she comes with. He thinks, as she gets older, that the pile is probably growing, too. Last time she certainly didn't have a trike. He knows this with certainty, as he is the one who bought it for her two days ago.

Today, however, he woke later than usual after forgetting to sleep for four days and crashing, so when the ninth text message and the fifth phone call combined had woken him, John arranged to bring Skye over. Sherlock submitted to the round of pointless questions about his general health and current ability to safeguard and nurture a baby for two days only because it was for Skye, and he himself had put others through far more rigorous checks before allowing them to care for her.

(John maintains Sherlock does this because he doesn't want them to have a babysitter that isn't him as he's jealous of the idea that Skye would love anyone more - except perhaps John and Mary. Sherlock dismisses the notion that a fourteenth month old can understand love, and very carefully does not arouse John's anger by implying that he is more worried about Skye's safety than her parents are. He knows that's not true, anyway. They just show it in different ways. Mary babyproofs things John and Sherlock didn't even know existed, John monitors minute changes and follows the highest standards of childrearing borne out by research to the letter, and Sherlock wards off anyone who Skye doesn't deserve to be sullied by. It's a long list.)

"Are you investigating the properties of the sheepskin, Skye?" Sherlock asks her, gettting down on the carpet to join in. In the next year or so she'll start wanting to play with others as opposed to alongside them, and it's never too early to encourage it. "What words do you know which describe the sheepskin?"

Mary and Sherlock are both firm believers that a baby learns best through seeing and hearing adults behave like adults do normally, giving them an ideal template to copy. John, for some unfathomable reason which he refuses to even try to justify, turns into a babbling idiot when his daughter is around, not to mention the amount of crawling and hiding and other childish endeavours he engages in. Sherlock remains dismayed that Skye, instead of finding this embarrassing and offputting as she should, will happily engage John in baby gurgle 'conversation' for long minutes at a time, and laughs with delight, sometimes shrieks, when he pops out from behind a chair. She should really have higher standards for her father, but maybe she's just being kind.

Skye says, "Gaaa," which isn't a word but Sherlock holds close the hope that it's an attempt at one. She then tries to twist and crawl at the same time, falls over her own leg and drops sideways onto the rug. Encouragingly, she then rolls onto her stomach and plants her face in the rug, so perhaps it was all a planned maneouver to conserve energy in order to catalogue the softness of it.

Or perhaps she's still quite unsteady. Sherlock picks her up and seats her on her bottom again before she asphyxiates.

Skye looks at him, chewing on one of her fists, and mumbles something unintelligable between a blob of saliva. Then the other hand goes for the inevitable, so before he gets yet another data entry about exactly how hard a baby can pull on an adult's hair - _hard_ \- he lifts her swiftly up, holding one hand in each of his. His right hand is now covered in baby spit. Sherlock has most certainly encountered worse fluids in his life, but he is looking forward to the time when she doesn't constantly leak.

"Sherlock, dear, didn't you hear the doorbell? It's your brother." Sherlock ignores the question; he knows Mrs Hudson will answer it for herself in a moment. He rarely hears anything outside of a room when Skye is in it. She's too fascinating and too precious to waste time collecting sensory data on other things - and, these days, too mobile as well. She can get from the living room to his bedroom quicker than he can. Or at least she could, until Mary installed stairgates and also a tie to keep the kitchen doors closed. It's bothersome to have to go out into the hall every time he needs to use the kitchen, but it's much more preferable to having Skye investigate the kitchen cupboards.

"I didn't realise you had company," Mycroft says, stopping behind the stairgate even though Mrs Hudson has opened it and walked in.

"Skye isn't company," Sherlock says, standing as Mrs Hudson has now taken the baby from him. She is already squirming to be let down after less than a second of being held, but he knows Mrs Hudson isn't that easily outdone. "She's a member of the family."

"Sophie, Sherlock," Mrs Hudson says, sounding exasperated, which is ridiculous. "Her name's Sophie." Sherlock ignores this, as does Skye.

Mycroft looks almost pained, and steps into the room. "Whose family?" he asks, not for the first time.

"Close the gate," Sherlock motions, and waits for Mycroft to parse the words and figure it out before continuing. "Did you want something, brother dear?"

Skye shrieks her annoyance to the room. Mrs Hudson tuts at her and murmurs some admonishment, but she puts Skye back on the rug. Skye is beautifully manipulative. She sits and looks at Mycroft, the new object in the room. Mycroft, rudely, isn't looking back.

"I'm going out in a moment, Sherlock," Mrs Hudson says to herself as she leaves the room. "If you need any help just text me - I've got the hang of it, now," she tells Mycroft, who doesn't care.

"I won't," says Sherlock, bending momentarily to bring some brightly coloured thing closer to Skye, as she looks like she's thinking about investigating Mycroft and that ought to be discouraged.

"Won't text me or won't need me?" Mrs Hudson asks, prepared to berate him for either.

"Both," Sherlock says as he crosses the room. "Enjoy your...out," and he closes the door on her.

"Pottery class!" she calls through the door, and mutters her way down the stairs.

"As I said," Mycroft says, glancing for the briefest of seconds at Skye and then looking back to Sherlock, "I didn't realise you had company, so this can wait." He begins to leave, but Sherlock's not letting him get away that easily, even if he didn't want him here in the first place.

"What can wait?" he asks. Mycroft pauses, tense, by the door.

"It's a matter of national security which requires your full attention," he responds. "I shall come back...tomorrow evening," he finishes, after glancing quickly around the room.

"Tell me now," Sherlock demands. "Skye won't tell, she'll help." If he pays attention, he has found that he can use Skye's presence to sharpen his focus. There's the tangible reminder to consider a different point of view, but also the knowledge that he only has a limited amount of time to work on anything before she will require input. More than once he has solved a case within minutes of walking into John and Mary's. (John, despite agreeing that this is brilliant, has told him if he does it again between the hours of midnight and five am that he will have to stay until Skye gets back to sleep and remain for the rest of the day to deal with her when she is grouchy. John seems to think this is a threat.)

Mycroft hesitates for just long enough for the puzzle pieces to start clicking into place. "Why don't you like her?" Sherlock asks, offended. He picks Skye up, as though his arms and his love can guard her against the rejection of others, even those who she doesn't need anyway.

"If you are referring to the baby, Sherlock, I have no opinion of her one way or the other."

Mycroft is shockingly poor at telling this lie, and some of the puzzle pieces move around.

"You don't like babies," Sherlock says. Skye twists in his arms, but he doesn't put her down, instead moving her to the other side. He doesn't want to let her go yet; she feels like some sort of protective shield. "But you do like children."

"Most children are idiots, as are most adults," Mycroft says. The fact that he still hasn't improved the mask over his vulnerability is unusual, and slightly disturbing, but Sherlock wouldn't be himself if he left it alone. He needs to know, and the fact that Mycroft is still standing there probably means he's conceding that.

"But you give them time," Sherlock says. "You let them prove themselves to be idiots, before you-"

He's interrupted by a shriek from Skye, finally having decided she needs more stimulation than being held can provide. It's not surprising; she is an intelligent child. He sets her down and hands her a cloth book, but she soon drops it in favour of pulling herself up on the armchair and setting to cruising around the furniture. He keeps an eye on her whilst maintaining eye contact with Mycroft to check she isn't about to do one of her sudden several step solo jaunts, which usually leave her catapulting forwards.

Mycroft is looking at her, now, and Sherlock can't decipher his expression because he's blanked it deliberately. "Before you dismiss them," Sherlock continues. "You dimiss adults before they prove anything but you give children a chance."

"Children have a lot more potential than fully formed adults," Mycroft says.

"So why not babies?"

There is a long pause, one which would have been uncomfortable if it were with anyone else, if only because Sherlock can sense how much it means and that something painful is about to be revealed. He wants Skye back in his arms, but she's moving between his chair and the desk now, unconcernedly exploring her way through the world. It would be selfish to stop her and apparently, Sherlock's not that selfish.

Mycroft clears his throat, barely. "Babies are delicate," he says.

"So when did you break one?" Sherlock asks, and unusually knows the second he finishes that it was the wrong thing to say.

Mycroft's expression is pained, but he doesn't leave room for Sherlock to - what, apologise? - before he bites back, "I didn't."

His voice suggests he thinks he did, but he's speaking someone else's words.

"Tell me," Sherlock says, and that's when Skye goes for her few awkward steps, three before she goes down. Sherlock moves on instinct but Mycroft is closer, and he scoops her up with none of the awkward movements of a man whose suits seem welded to him, and all of the practice of someone who's done this before, as an adult, and who would do it again a thousand times over.

"Tell me," Sherlock says again, quieter this time, stopping a couple of paces away. Mycroft is looking directly at Skye now, his head bent down to see her face. He jogs her in his arms and she pauses in her inspection of his breast pocket to look up and reach chubby fingers out to grasp his ear. He smiles, completely naturally, and it's unlike anything Sherlock's ever seen before.

Then Mycroft glances up, sees him staring, and briskly puts Skye down whilst containing what looks like a full body shiver. "It isn't a happy story."

"I surmised," Sherlock says. Skye is at his feet now, grabbing at the knees of his trousers to haul herself up, and he picks her up for a few moments before she's done with that and wants to explore the room again. "Tell me anyway."

Mycroft takes a seat on the couch, and Sherlock sits in John's chair because it's the best position to see Skye from at the moment. She's found her stacking cups and may or may not be performing tests relating to capacity, using some cotton wool balls which have fallen out of the changing bag. She seemed to have gone past the eating cotton wool stage a couple of months ago, but he still needs to watch out for it.

"Just before you entered rehab," Mycroft begins, and Sherlock knows now why he doesn't know this story, this apparently very important part of Mycroft's life, "a woman with whom I had previously been in a relationship contacted me after several months apart. It transpired that she was pregnant."

Sherlock sees, in his head, John asking here, "What was her name?" like it was important.

"The baby had not been planned, obviously, but I was...happy to be given the opportunity." Sherlock doesn't believe it was happy. For Mycroft to be this devastated now, he must have been ecstatic.

"We resumed our relationship and the baby was born two months later. You'll remember, you were detained for almost eight months." Sherlock does remember, and it's entirely irrelevant. He stays quiet and watches Skye stack, more by accident than design if her gross motor skills are anything to go by.

"When she was five months old, she was put down in her crib to sleep. She did not wake up. Up until that point she had been entirely healthy and indeed exceeding her milestones."

For the first time in his life, Sherlock does not answer the first question that comes into his head - what was the cause of death? - because he knows the second question is much more important, not just to Mycroft but to him. "What was her name?"

"Annabelle," Mycroft says softly. "Her mother wanted Anna, I wanted Bella. We compromised."

There is a long silence before Sherlock says, "You didn't harm her." He can't say _kill her_ because nobody should talk about babies that way.

"And I also did not save her," Mycroft says. He looks directly at Skye again, for the first time since he put her down. "Why do you call her Skye?" he asks, obviously not wanting the rational explanation for why he was not responsible for his daughter's death. Mycroft is the only person in the world more rational than Sherlock and it clearly hasn't helped him here.

"Sophie's boring," he says. Skye looks at him for a second, then goes back to her cups. Her attention span is still improving rapidly. "I refuse to use a name which has been listed in the top ten baby names for the past twenty years. She's much more remarkable than that."

"She's not the only thing," Mycroft muses, and Sherlock would throw that back to him if it weren't such a raw moment.

They both watch Skye for a long time, long after she's lost interest in the cups and has moved onto the contents of her spare clothes bag. Sherlock catches a tiny movement out of the corner of his eye, knows it's Mycroft preparing to leave and says, without meaning to, "Skye's not quite so delicate any more." The movement ceases. "She's getting stronger every day. And more intelligent."

"Well," says Mycroft as he stands. "Keep me up to date on her progress." He means it and Sherlock knows it and he promises himself, for Annabelle who he never met and for her father, who he never knew apart from in his grief, that he will.

Mycroft lets himself out and doesn't call back about the matter of national security.

As it turns out, some things are more important, even to Mycroft Holmes.

**Author's Note:**

> I adore concrit.


End file.
